Eurorack patching adventures

Last week was all about the new proces. The idea was I make a patch on my eurorack, record it, make samples and make a track out of it. I already encountered some time difficulties getting all this work done in a week. So I let go of the fixed time table and started at the first item on the task list.

Patching the Eurorack synth, it’s a pretty basic setup, think of a single voice mono synth with some extra modulation. The great thing about Eurorack, or any other like-minded system like Max MSP, Reaktor or VCV is that you can construct your own path of sound & functions. This is a double edged sword as it can lead to just patching and nothing further. Which is always a dangerous thing with me, being limited in time. 

It’s also a way to escape the limitations in processing sound by my brain, I can patch without sound and audition the results later. Perfect for me. So while time flies when patching, it’s a great way for me to learn more about developing sounds, signal flow and other sound designing stuff without over extending myself. 

The second part of the week was spent learning max map further and reading about design in general. Which is always interesting. Max MSP has a high threshold for me in getting fluent with it so it will take time mastering it to a degree I can write ideas without spending time in books and manuals but its fun and has the added benefit of not having to have sound on all the time. 

All in all a good week spending time doing music and music related things. Looking forward to next (technically this week as I am a bit late writing this blog) week. 

First week with the small setup & new process focussed mindset

Working with my small setup has advantages, After spending a week working with it on a consistent basis. It’s easier to get going and I am far less distracted. My first idea was to work on a patch for a few days, then record loops and then finish a track, all  within a week and build a catalog of work that way.

This timeline was a bit over enthusiastic, as I am with a lot of my planning. But given the focus and shift from goals towards the process of working on my skills, I am still happy with my progress this week.

I have also build in a learning and education bit into the process. So I am studying Max MSP again. Which is great fun and pretty difficult. But it’s very promising as I have tons of ideas already for merging Eurorack with Max MSP and building a set of tools for it.

I need to focus on the proces first. And not jump on and trying to get all these ideas out as fast as possible. I have to leave the pressure out of the equation.

I do pencil my ideas down in my notebooks, and work on them by working them out in the notebooks. So I keep working on ideas while doing the work. It easy to dream away and imagine great goals ahead and try to reach them as fast as possible and burn yourself out. It’s hard to focus on the small incremental gains and work on your skillset. At least for me. 

Showing up is half the work, or battle. But it’s hard and not easy at all. At least for me. Just twiddling knobs and enjoying the hobby is nice, but doesn’t get me towards my goals. There is playtime reserved into the process, don’t worry there is fun to be had. But I also  need to choose the harder path. In the end it will be more fore filling and rewarding.

Let’s see what this week brings. 

Simple creative tasks, consistent.

Last week In talked about simplifying my setup and designing a proces to be more consistent. This article is more about the proces and why it works. While I am learning to use my music gear I have also set some small tasks to keep things interesting and work on finishing stuff. I do well when I set goals for myself. My biggest flaw in setting these goals in making them way too big. Where my goals far outstripped my skillset.

So I have decided to simplify my goals, or rather just make tasks out of them. so for each week I have set the following goals. With my simple set-up, I will try and finish these tasks every week. You can’t really call the results tracks maybe, but I will try my best to keep it as interesting as possible. within the parameters I have set for myself.

The main goal is learning to be fluent with my simple setup and be able to work on ideas at a faster pace. Science shows that in order to keep yourself engaged the things you need to do to make progress is to have a difficulty sweet spot. If something is too easy, you will disengage. If it’s too hard, you will also disengage. It’s human nature.  There is a side note to this, more on that later. 

Creating habits is all about doing something consistently and keep doing it. To be better at making music, I need to be making music. Taking into account it should not be too easy or too hard my tasks should be just about doable. 

So I will learn and keep having fun and feel excited. Everyone has big goals, but if it’s way too hard we can’t form the habits necessary for achieving them. Last week an already shared some idea around a set of steps to achieve this. 

Here is my slightly refined taks list.

1. Create a patch on my small eurorack setup
2. Record loops while playing the patch
3. Take a maximum of 8 loops in the Ableton template.
4. Arrange and finish the recordings. 
5. Publish the results.

By sharing them I have also set a nice little reminder for myself to publish things consistently, so people can give me feedback and get over my fear of sharing my musical experiments. 

The side note is that every process has boring parts that are necessary to get better. So this means we also need some tolerance for boredom. So if something gets boring at any stage, we tend to go and look for something exciting and new.

The key difference in being successful in getting better at your skill and creating habits is that you embrace the boredom which ultimately creeps into everything. Some stuff just needs doing. No matter what. It’s all part of the process. People who succeed in showing up when feeling bored, or tired or any state that doesn’t fill you with enthusiasm to go to work, people who still show up, succeed. 

It’s a bit of a balancing act, creating habits and paving the way towards your goal and being able to consistently work on your goals. The mantra “Don’t break the chain” is a simple way to remind yourself to stick to the plan. If you don’t feel like doing music, go to the gym or any other task you planned. Just remind yourself and repeat this mantra a few times to yourself. It will help to reaffirm your commitment to the proces, and the habit you are developing and maintaining. 

Last but not least, we also need to evaluate, learn and make things a bit harder again at some point. So we can work on improvement with some new challenges. 

Consistency has helped me with achieving other goals in life, so now it’s time to make it work for my musical journey. 

A simple setup, more focus

Some time ago I have decided to take a smaller set of instruments to make my music with. The bigger the setup, the more problems I have making decisions. It might be fun to know what I have chosen to work with. First choice, an old samper, the Emu ESI 4000. Floppy disks operated. Who still knows what these things are?

A drummachine, The under appreciated  Elektron Machine drum and a small selection of eurorack modules and a sequencer. The eurorack is basically a single voice mono synth and a reverb.

To record and arrange everything I have made an Ableton template with 8 tracks with some effects, which I will not change. This gives me some sound design options after recording.

The simple idea is, I design a patch, make loops in the sampler, record them in Ableton and divide them over a maximum of 8 tracks. Then I will try and make something interesting with it. I will take a fixed amount of days to try and make a track out of it. Whether it is a finished product or not, I will publish the result.

That last thing might seen a bit strange, but if I don’t publish it, I will not get used to sharing things. When I write a blog I have no problem of hitting the publish button. I might get over my fear of sharing my music this wat.

Quantity over quality

One of the things I doubt is the quality of my creative output. Whether it’s my writing, my pictures or my writing skills, I often have doubts about the quality of the work. Especially with my music, and the main reason I almost never share anything.

I really want to change this. I strive for perfection in everything and while pursuing perfection I often trow away ideas or keep tweaking to find it. For some reason I am more easy going in other areas, like writing. Probably because I feel I am somewhat better at it which makes it easier for me to share.

Society teaches us that everything must be ‘perfect’, what this ‘perfect’ is nobody tells you. And while striving for perfection a lot of good ideas are lost and the art of experimentation is lost.

Science teaches us something else. If you want to be good at something, you need to practice a lot. You increase your skills by doing and while doing you learn from your mistakes. By sharing your work you give others the opportunity to give feedback, which is another opportunity to learn.

In Japan it’s very normal to accept the beauty of imperfection, wabi-sabi, the acceptance and transience of imperfection. In art it’s often described as ‘imperfect beauty’ or ‘flawed beauty’ it emphasizes the process of making a piece of art resulting in an art piece that is ultimately incomplete.

We don’t have this in western cultures, which is a real shame. Our need for perfection puts the break on our output. Or as Voltaire said it “the best is the enemy of the good”. Things don’t have to be perfect. In life and especially in all forms of creative output perfection is a debatable concept.

So why do I struggle so much with sharing my music? I think it is because music is very valuable to me. I have so much great memories attached to music. and music has gotten me through some hard times that all my musical output seems pale in comparison, will it ever be good enough to evoke any emotion?

This sounds a bit heavy but that’s how I feel about it. I need to let this feeling go and start sharing my creations. Even if it’s just a loop or an unfinished piece of music. Striving for perfection is something I need to let go and focus on improving by making a lot of stuff. Quantity over quality, in order to improve my skills and let go of my fear of sharing. The quality will come over time.

Consistency is key, don’t keep focussing on goals.

Music making is an art, and behind any great art there is a lot of skill. So instead of focussing on the art and my goals I have to focus on developing my skills. Whether it be mastering an instrument of choice or knowing how to operate any part of the music making process.

Having goal is something I need, and while I am excellent at making a plan and working towards this goal, my lack of focus on my musical skillsets has set me back in achieving these goals.

I forgot how important it is to be fluent at something. I have always compared my music making process with developing solutions, whether it be in software or writing a proposal or technical design for something.

All the while forgetting the amount of time spent doing it and improving my skills by simply doing it. Not having any big goals. When I started out learning how to program, I just spent hours trying to get something to work. At some point writing becomes second nature and when you have come up with the solution to a problem. Writing about the solution and creating the end product become much easier.

Most of the time spent isn’t learning a language, but finding the right path towards a solution.

My music making process should be the same, I have an idea and figure out which of the tools I need, or just fire up some instruments and simply start writing anything. And see what comes out of it. Which I do for fun as well with programming or anything else. Just doing it to get something going.

The problem I face with my musical endeavors is that I don’t nearly have as much hours of doing music as I have done with any of my other skills.

So it’s time to start and simply work on learning the skill of making music without any goals directly in mind. Not forcing the focus on my goals but focus on getting better. consistency is the name of the game, with anything but especially with learning a new skill. So I will just focus on constant work. 

Just like I did with everything else. Just did not know it at the time.

Music projects some thoughts on progress and goals.

Getting back in music is a bit harder than expected. I still have trouble listening to music for a longer period of time. Especially when working on music. Sound designing and listening to loops and getting stuff done.

So I am currently working on learning Max MSP so that I can work on music without the sound. Which is a bit of a paradox.

What I can’t let go are my goals. Simply because having my goals is the driving force behind it all. Somehow I will loose my consistency if I do that. It might seem strange, because just messing around with a drummachine is a lot of fun. But the fun alone isn’t enough for me to work on music on a regular basis. I easily skip it when I am not feeling it.

So I keep music making in my planning, and work on it at least 3 times a week for short amounts of time, preventing any problems that might arise.

I am optimistic that at some point I can increase the work and listen to music for longer periods of time again. Which then automatically gets me closer to my musical goals.

A side project, The Creditcard Hedgefund

I like finance and learning about it, used to write about this topic here as well. I was thinking about getting back into the topic when I stumbled upon substack. Which is a platform for writers. I thought I might try this out and start a little experiment.

My real long term investment plan is really simple, buy an index fund and hold it. The main goal for my investment is to work on my pension. Long term boring stuff, which to my mind is a good thing.

On the other hand, a more active approach can ben fun as well, and very hard to do. As well as the fact most people with an active approach lose money or underperform a simple index fund.

But I am going to test this myself with paper short term (day)trading. And to give Substack a go I set it up there.

Researching the topic of day trading this reddit came up, and made a lot of sense. So I took this as a starting point for my own adventures.

Keep in mind that nothing on here or on my Substack should be taken as investment advice, please do your own research and due diligence, or consult a professional.

With this warning out of the way, I will outline the idea. The credit card hedgefund is an experiment to see if I can make a profit while actively trading my portfolio. The name comes from the budget I set myself to start out with, my credit card limit of € 3500.

It’s all done on paper, no real trades or real money is at stake. I might do that later on or try other strategies but time will tell.

I need to trade 3 months and make 100 trades and be profitable. There are some more specifications, but read all about it on my Substack.

Max MSP a learning journey

As some older followers of this blog know I have been learning Max MSP. Which now has more focus since I can work on projects without sound. I have been looking at various ways to keep it going and not having to stop due to insufficient cognitive energy.

I have been working on a new way of daily planning which involves shorter time frames and more of them, which has some advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is the continuous workflow. The short instances the biggest drawdown.

Max MSP itself for me has a steep learning curve, although the help files and the various books on it are great, I am going to try and fund some one on one teaching to get up to speed. Hopefully this will help.

I have dusted off an old looper project, my first idea for building tracks based on loops recorded from a Eurorack system. It was a pretty big system I had in mind which I now scaled down to make it functional as soon as possible.

Momentum is key now, otherwise I will keep trying to bite off more than I can chew. I will also try and compose and share some stuff from this setup.

Less is more

The larger the setup the more options I have. Which I absolutely love. However this also has a time implication, more of my limited time and energy will go into setting up and learning how to use it. I have tried to use a limited set of tools before which quickly escalated into much larger setups.

I am not very good in keeping a small setup and focussing on just that setup. Which is a bit weird as my discipline is pretty good. I can keep to my planning. I suppose this is because I love my toys. I am like a little kid in a toy store which is allowed to play with anything. And this does not yield any result. Just a lot of unfinished sketches.

So this time I absolutely need to keep my setup small and learn it inside out. which will be my focus the coming month. I keep my timelines a bit wider as last time I got frustrated with not achieving my goals. In retrospect I had too many things I wanted to get done in too little time.

This time that has to change. There is a lot to do which will take time. That’s just how it is.